Search

Once again, I’m going to combine two things into one to try to get caught up. Since both Thing 8 and Thing 9 are individual productivity tools, I should be able to handle them both in one post without getting too long-winded.

Thing 8 is Google Calendar. I love this tool! I’ve had a Google account for a while for email, but only within the past 5 or so years have I really started to take advantage of the other tools that Google provides. I love how easy it is to share calendars and add others’ calendars to your own. I am an officer with my library school’s joint student and alumni organization, SLISConnect, and we use a Google calendar that we share to keep track of meeting and events, which is very convenient since we do most of our work virtually. I also have my calendar set up to sync with my iPhone calendar, so changes I make to one are updated on the other, and I love the option to send myself alerts to make sure I don’t forget something I may have put on my schedule weeks ago.

I’ll be doubling up on Things 6&7 because they’re related: both about networks. Thing 6 is about online networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and library-specific ones like LISNPN, LATnetwork (Librarians as Teachers Network) and CILIP communities (or for those of us in the US, ALA Connect). I’m adding Twitter, because this is the one I used most often for online networking.

The ALA Annual Conference is this weekend, and I thought I’d do a quick roundup of some tips for new attendees I’ve seen over the past few weeks. My first ALA was the 2009 conference in Chicago, and I did not plan as well as I should have. I did take a look at the preliminary schedule and picked out sessions I was interested in, but I didn’t know about any of the social events, didn’t really map out my schedule to see if it was feasible to get between sometimes fairly far-flung locations, and didn’t take advantage of all the services on offer. Don’t let this happen to you!

Last year I started the 23 Things for Professional Development course, but got sidetracked after Thing 4. In fact, I got sidetracked from the blog entirely – I think I felt that I couldn’t post until I was ready to finish the 23 things! After a while it seemed too late to start back up again. However, I just realized that they’re holding the 23 Things course again this summer. It started a bit earlier this year than last, but since I already posted about Things 1-4 I’m only a bit behind if I jump in now. I hope that this will help me get back into the habit of regular blogging.